


Make Room

by rageprufrock



Category: Smallville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2010-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clark made room, and Lex fit. Imperfectly, but Lex fit better than anyone else ever would.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make Room

The Kents didn't have a guest bed, and Lex spent the night in Clark's room.

It was a measure of how bad the situation was that he didn't think about the possibilities inherent in such an arrangement. He just gave in to Martha Kent's steady, staid gaze and set his bag down by Clark's desk, showered, and collapsed in his bed. But he was still Lex Luthor, and Clark was still Something Special, so Lex had taken a deep breath of clean cotton sheets and the smell of Kansas buried deep into the fibers of the mattress before passing out into blessed, dreamless sleep.

He didn't remember ever having been that tired, not since the morning his mother died.

But falling asleep in your best friend's bed was different than crawling into your mother's divan in her solarium and sleeping for forty hours.

There were similarities, of course: flashes of daylight and evening and moon in between dark, safe sleep; movement from the corners of your consciousness that you suppressed with all your power; the strength it took to hide mountains and shake off memory and reality until you'd healed, or at least patched yourself enough to deal with the world that still revolved impatiently around you. Lex remembered waking up exhausted, more tired than when he'd gone to bed.

At the Kents, he woke up to absolute silence. Blearily, he looked to the nightstand - wondered tangentially where Clark was - and saw that it was only four in the morning. Apparently, even organic farmers didn't bother to drag themselves from bed until five o'clock.

Lex laid in bed for a while and stared at the ceiling. It was spackled stucco, cheap and ordinary like a thousand other houses constructed in Kansas and all over the Midwest. But Lex knew that this house had been designed and built by Hiram Kent himself, real salt of the Earth, man of the people, and all those other meaningless epithets that only made a difference during town hall meetings for small people with small dreams. Lex wouldn't ever say it to Jonathan Kent, but he imagined they both knew that the latter was destined for a contained existence, and Lex was there to lead Clark away from it; tension from divergent forces was to be expected, Lex knew. Lex had never held Jonathan's dislike of him against Jonathan; it was all about physics, and science, Lex understood with total clarity.

He looked to his left and studied the nightstand more carefully. There was a box of tissues (essential for any teenaged boy - the hand lotion was probably hidden in the drawer), an old lamp, change, wadded up notes, and a few books, stacked haphazardly: To Kill A Mockingbird, The Joy Luck Club, and some ridiculous-sounding book about family conflict. He ran one idle hand along the spine of the first book, tracing the letters and thinking about Truman Capote and conspiracy theories and Southern comfort; Smallville wasn't so terribly different from Maycomb, Lex thought. And in Smallville, he was some sort of bizarre cross between Tom Robinson, the Ewells, and Mrs. Dubose; though, Lex admitted, a dying morphine addict was probably closer to his personality at his arrival at Smallville than he cared to think about.

He sighed, and pushed himself up on elbows, looking around himself.

He'd never had that moment of bleariness between waking and sleep. It had always just been an instant transition, a snap between dreamsome slumber and total alertness; the doctors had told him that it couldn't be good for his heart to jump awake at the slightest sound. But then, fire had rained from the heavens on a blue October afternoon and Lex's heart became the least of his concerns. The castle woke him up every night at least twice, and the only sounds there were the low creaks of the building settling and the still fearsome memory of his father's voice, echoing in the halls, demanding something else. The Kents must have observed some sort of ritual silence; either that or Lex was as tired as he imagined he was supposed to be.

Lex debated whether or not to crawl out of the sheets. They were warm and soft, whereas the world around him - whether or not it was plastered by news clippings of local Smallville weirdness or Lex's business conquests and the soft blue of Clark's walls - seemed cold and uninviting. He figured that he owed it to himself to get out of bed, put on some pants, and make Clark's bed, because at some point, he was going to have to leave anyway, and it was better if he didn't end up letting anything fester or create an assprint or anything equally embarrassing.

Besides which, Lex thought, Clark's bed.

Not his place. Never his place. But that wasn't, for once, the issue at hand.

What seemed terribly important at that moment wasn't even the fact that LexCorp was gone, but rather that Clark had old, worn furniture reminiscent of the drawers and shelves from Excelsior. Lex thought that if he looked hard enough, he'd find someone else's name carved into the wood, old and worn smooth over the years; he ran his hand along the bottom edge of the bookshelf, feeling the pads of his fingers catch on scratches and rough spots until he pulled away and saw the gray-purple dust that matted itself into his palm.

He dusted his hands and pored over the news clippings that he'd seen as he had fallen asleep. Clark had what seemed like every single article ever written on the meteor shower pasted up somewhere in his room. The edges of the paper were yellowing and cracking, and many of them were obscured by newer articles and magazine clippings. There was a local piece by the Ledger on the opening of the Talon, as well as the Torch exclusive with Lana Lang about the same, a few snips about Smallville High School's honor role, and one tiny blurb from the Daily Planet about "C. Sullivan et al" who had interned there over the summer.

What took up the most space, Lex realized with flattered awe, were articles about him, about LexCorp. Clark seemed to have dedicated the wall facing his bed to Lex's business enterprises, and not a few of the more gossipy items from the Sunday Planet. Clark's bedroom wall was a timeline of LexCorp's inception and development, and for a moment, Lex entertained the idea of offering to buy them off of him, for posterity's sake. From the first articles regarding the usual amount of business activity that the young Luthor heir had been engaging in to malicious human interest stories masquerading as legitimate journalism bashing him for attacking his father's assets while Lionel was blind and dying. Then, more articles about acquisitions, sales, and contracts awarded, lost, botched, and fulfilled with a certain measure of flair only a Luthor could manage.

Lex liked to do things with a flourish.

He managed a smirk as he fingered a recent article: a full-color photograph of him and Helen at a charity event, linked arm in arm, laughing at something he couldn't quite remember any more. It was innocent and pretty, and the caption read, "Latest Luthor Pretty Here To Stay?" Cat Grant spent a fairly significant word count speculating on Helen Bryce, daughter of respected Metropolis plastic surgeon who had fled to Smallville; she went as far as to theorize that her flight from the city had been planned from the start. Lex remembered reading the article two weeks ago and almost pissing himself laughing when he came across the words "ah, young love." The machinations of fate and circumstance that had given Cat Grant a journalism degree were close and intimate with inappropriate jokes about professors' offices and rug burn.

But the best part about Clark's collage was the asides. Clark had taken the liberty of going through all of those grainy photographs and marking out Lionel's face and adding little comments in the margin that exposed him for the teenager that he really was. It was at once sobering and heartening: Lex might want more, but Lex wanted Clark to have all the simple, childish things that more might take away as well. Underneath a fairly scathing article of Lex's carrion tendencies, Clark's sloppy, familiar hand had written in, "Lionel = insane, lion-haired jerk. All deserved. Go, Lex." And Lex let the smile reach his eyes as he read, "Jesus God, Lex, you think you could look any more like you just got laid in that picture?" He could almost hear Clark saying it in his head.

He finally tore himself away from the wall long enough to examine Clark's desk, a few notebooks scattered there but it was clear that the desk wasn't where Clark did any of their work. Lex had trouble understanding people who took their business everywhere they went. He remembered seeing textbooks left on the living room couch, a French worksheet left out on the kitchen table; Lex had always done his work at his desk, put it aside, and left it there for other and better and more hazardous things. Granted, Lex spent a lot more time at his desk recently than at raves and digs and crack dens, but the principle was the same; work should have been separate from life. How did Clark stand that haphazard reminder of obligation all the time?

Maybe Clark hadn't ever learned to compartmentalize.

Enough snooping, Lex chastised himself. The Kents hadn't let him stay out of the goodness of their hearts because they planned for him to dig through their son's things when no one else was watching.

So Lex grabbed some jeans and a gray long-sleeved shirt and slipped into the hallway.

*

Lex was shaking out a few pills into his hand when Clark stumbled into the bathroom, wide-eyed and bleary like Lex hadn't ever been.

"Good morning," he said quietly, and didn't bother to look Clark up and down.

It wasn't the time and place for flirting, for watching, for wanting. Lex had realized the night before, in between dreaming and falling asleep, that whatever reasons he'd decided to become close to Clark, he'd stayed close for reasons that were more platonic than lecherous. He loved Clark's green eyes, but less than he loved the way that Clark could be expected to be there when needed, a friend, a hand to hold, and how he provided mostly-unshaken faith. Tight, old t-shirts and flannel boxers on a divine figure rated a zero on Lex's attention that morning.

They were in tight quarters of a pleasantly yellow bathroom, pastel cream tiles and sunny towels. An old cloth shower curtain Lex had looked at disapprovingly twenty minutes before, and then decided he liked better than his more modern shower doors. There was a fuzzy bathmat on the floor with a matching toilet seat cover and everything was just right, perfect and cluttered and lived in. Soap and half-empty shampoo bottles and floss and Listerine, a thousand other ordinary things that seemed to fit so much better in this utterly ordinary bathroom than they did against his sleek marble countertops.

What were his sleek marble countertops.

Lex had found and played with a seemingly-unused razor for a few seconds before he'd set it aside.

Razors were objects of blurry memories from back rooms in cities he didn't quite remember.

The entire bathroom was still steamy with hot air, and the mirror over the sink was powdered white; it had taken every ounce of Lex's barely-there adult maturity in order not to write something out in the steam. It had taken additional energy to make sure that if he did give in, that it wouldn't be a chemical reaction, physics formula, or anything equally geeky, though Newton's Law of Cooling would be oddly applicable to a hot bathroom.

Clark offered a sleepy smile and took a few more steps into the bathroom, too large to fit comfortably, Lex thought, whether or not Lex was in there anyway.

"Morning, Lex," Clark said through a yawn. He reached for a blue toothbrush and the toothpaste before blinking hard, trying to shake the sleep from his brain. "Did you sleep okay?" he went on, squeezing the tube right in the middle, and the carefully reconstructed shape of the toothpaste was destroyed again after Lex had spent over five minutes meticulously squeezing and straightening.

Lex shrugged. "Well enough." He mouthed the tablets and as he felt his throat working around them, Clark watched him curiously.

"What're those?" Clark asked, voice almost suspicious, and Lex figured he had a right to be.

After all, Lex Luthor had built up a reputation on managing to take ordinary things and taking them to extraordinary levels of destructiveness.

"Potassium Iodide," Lex said easily. "I have a lifetime prescription." Clark looked blank. "You're supposed to take them before nuclear exposure, but. Just to be safe." Lex didn't think about the meteors cutting across the sky, red bleeding into the clouds like a large, jagged cut, and how the earth shook like it was shattering into a thousand separate pieces, how the smell of burning flesh and hair would never, ever leave him; it was the best he could do to pretend he didn't remember too vividly. "Another gift of the meteor shower."

Something fractured in Clark's gaze.

Lex didn't bother trying to figure out why. This wasn't about Clark's secrets, either.

This was about safe haven, comfort, the eye of the storm. Lex was tired.

"It's all right, Clark," he said automatically. "It was years ago."

"That doesn't make it okay," Clark argued.

"It goes a long way," Lex replied gently, and realized it was true.

They studied one another for a long time before Lex made himself smile and ask Clark why he had Elmo bubble bath.

*

Lex was heating up syrup when Martha and Jonathan Kent emerged from upstairs. Neither of them looked to be at their best.

He assumed it was his presence. Having a murderer and potential psychopath under ones roof tended to have a negative impact on the sleeping patterns of most humans; he only spared Clark a glance before he wrote it off, since Clark was preternaturally human, and not fitting of any description prefixed by "most," anyway.

"Good morning Mr and Mrs. Kent," he said, politely like a reflex.

"Good morning, Lex," Martha replied sluggishly. "Was the bed okay?"

"The bed was perfectly fine," Lex said. "And I really must thank you again for the hospitality."

He saw Jonathan settle onto a stool from the corner of his eye, a large, sun-browned mass of disapproving expressions and tired flannel. There were days when it took every iota of Lex's better judgment and all of his memory of finishing school to keep him from giving Jonathan Kent his just due; today, Lex thought the man looked bearable, if not likeable. Lex had abandoned hope for making Jonathan like or respect him ages ago, he only prayed for peace now.

Clark breezed back into the room with a smile, pressing a kiss to his mother's cheek and laying a hand on his dad's shoulder as he said, "You got it, Lex?"

Lex rolled his eyes, unable to suppress almost-rudeness even in the face of polite company. Not with Clark. "I can microwave things, Clark."

And how remarkably out of place had the microwave seemed against all the old fixtures. It was a modern, plastic blob of wires and electricity lost in homemade pot holders, knitted oven mitts, old copper saucepans, ceramic flour jars and cookies tossed in what looked like WWII era tins. There were wooden salt and pepper shakers and the daisies were impossibly white, bunched together in a large, chipped pitcher, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. The curtains were of some sort of fairytale material. Gingham was Lex's first guess but he'd only ever seen it at his tailor's, and only because some incompetent assistant had accidentally brought that instead of the gray wool; besides, it was impossibly provincial and Martha Kent had grown up in Metropolis, after all.

He'd hidden out in this kitchen when his father had first made himself at home in the mansion that wasn't his anymore.

He found it fitting, altogether right in the midst of so many things gone horribly wrong, that he ought to be there again.

"I'm really sorry about this," he said, because it seemed to fit in that moment. Lex had found over the years that most good things were bought through apology.

Clark frowned and opened his mouth before his mother had a chance to contest it. "Don't be, Lex. You're my friend - our friend." He looked like he wanted to reach out and make sure that Lex knew it, really got that, but he restrained himself, just laid one large, bronze hand on the counter. "I'm glad to have you here. No matter why you're here, Lex."

Lex raised an eyebrow. "Even if you had to sleep on the couch."

"Especially that," Clark chirped, and Martha smiled approvingly while Jonathan eyed the exchange in the background with distant wariness.

Don't worry, Lex wanted to tell him, I'm not trying to unearth your secrets today. Maybe never again. Why ruin it all?

There were already placemats at the breakfast counter, Lex saw finally, three in total. There really wasn't enough space to fit a fourth.

He didn't say a word.

Clark said, "We'll make room."

Lex had spent most of his hours at the Kent house thinking that whatever it was that staying there was, it wasn't about love or anything more than simple, casual friendship. Only he'd been all wrong. Friendship was as much about being in love as it was about being in like, and Lex and Clark liked one another very, very much, it seemed. The minutes they'd spent together saying nothing of any importance in the bathroom, how Clark hadn't given a second thought to letting Lex see his bedroom, letting himself and his walls be exposed, to how he'd opened up his arms and his family and his eyes -

They weren't about love, Lex thought, blurry, it was love, or as close to any physical manifestation as he could find then.

Clark made room, and Lex fit. Imperfectly, but Lex fit better than anyone else ever would.

He wanted to take those moments, hold them up, and catalogue them for later.

But Clark was looking at him so Lex turned to pull the heated up syrup from the microwave, setting it on the breakfast counter carefully. Behind him, he heard the toaster pop and Clark jogged over and pulled out the last pair of waffles before ushering everyone to the table. Martha doled out forks and knives and smiles while Jonathan grumbled about nobody getting any ideas about folding napkins into any fancy-pants designs.


End file.
